Thank you for your interest in learning about the author of this blog. I’m Antonio Cangiano and I work as a Software Engineer and Technical Evangelist at IBM, for the Toronto Software Lab, where the kick ass DB2 Express-C database is produced. I’ll start with a disclaimer that is required by both my employer and my type of job. It’s my personal blog, which is entirely independent from IBM. My articles and comments are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer positions, strategies or opinions.

In case you were wondering, the uncommon surname is due to the fact that I’m Italian and I was born and raised in Italy. In 2003. I decided to leave my country, foreseeing the worsening of its economy in the years to come. I spent two and a half years in Ireland, and then between early 2006 and January 2012 I lived in Toronto with my beautiful Canadian wife (who has an awesome vintage blog and scrapbook blog). In early 2012 we moved to Penticton, B.C. (also in Canada).

The “Zen” in the title of this blog should be intended philosophically and not religiously, as I’m a happy rationalist atheist.

I’m very passionate about programming languages, algorithms, database and development in general, and I’ve a soft spot for mathematics as well. I’m mostly interested in dynamic languages, and best known for Ruby, but I also know and program in a few other languages and never stop looking at interesting developments elsewhere. My favorite web framework is Rails, but I’m not religious about it. I am a big advocate of using the right tool for the right job, and whatever makes you happy in the end.

Related interests of mine include: number crunching and applied mathematics, data mining, cloud computing, big data, the world of micro ISVs, startups and entrepreneurship in general, blogging, social media, the new Web, and above all staying on the cutting edge of technology both on and off the web. I’m also into photography.

In the past few years, I have come to appreciate Mac OS X, which has become my favorite operating system for most tasks, even though I regularly still use both Linux (particularly Ubuntu) and Windows at work.

I have made small contributions to a few books, and authored two full books myself:

If you are a regular reader or attended one of the conferences where I was a speaker, feel free to add me to your network by visiting my LinkedIn profile or by emailing me at acangiano@gmail.com (I trust Bayesian spam filtering).

Feel free to get in touch, but please keep in mind that I receive many emails everyday, so if the subject matter is not urgent or important, you may have to wait a little while before receiving an answer (if I manage to answer), don’t take it personally. You can also follow me on Twitter, if you’d like to get to know me better.

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